TPM Election Central has the new DNC web ad hitting McCain on his Iraq flip-flops, particularly on his many and varied projections for when U.S. troops can come home.
TPM Reader MO actually boils it down to a formula …
MGUT: Age + Over-handling = Cringe
My thoughts on the gauntlet that Josh just threw down. I say this as someone who would be classified as a grudgingly McCain admirer back in ’00 (as a combination of Clinton fatigue and a visceral distaste for Bush before it was cool):
The way McCain looks on the stump now reminds me of how my older relatives looked after I came back from college. Before I left, they were the people I always knew. When I got back, the changes that age produces were glaringly clear. As Josh says, a lot happens between 64 and 71. Furthermore, let’s compare McCain and Reagan – the last national politician running for office at an advanced age. McCain’s charisma has been based on energy and pugnaciousness. Reagan was always avuncular. McCain doesn’t do avuncular. And, of course, Reagan in ’80 was younger than McCain is now. The Reagan of ’84 was given a huge benefit of the doubt with regards to age because of incumbency.
Also, clearly, McCain is being over-handled in the way that reminds me of the Gore of ’00. In general, the more times people give you advice about your personal mannerisms, the less you come across as natural. That’s what people mean by WJC and Obama (and GWB, alas) being natural politicians.
So, I don’t think it has anything to do with the topics he’s covering. Sure, better speech writing would help to steer clear of landmines (here’s a hint: no jokes and no sarcasm!).
From The News & Observer …
L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he’d ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.
Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.
When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours’ delay, one of Eason’s employees hung the flags at half-staff.
…
In a string of e-mail messages with his superiors, Eason was told he could either lower the flags or retire effective immediately.
Though he’s only 51, Eason chose to retire, although he pleaded several times to be allowed to stay at the lab. Eason, who had worked for the Agriculture Department since graduating from college, was paid $65,235 a year as the laboratory manager.
TPM Reader RM gives us his GUTMC with Fred Thompson in the mix …
I’ve been saying for months that McCain has a bad case of Republican entitlement. He’s as bad as Fred Thompson was in the sense that the idea that you actually have to RUN for president – like, actually ask people to vote for you – not only befuddles but vaguely offends him. I’m sure he made his real decision to run well before the 2006 elections, and he thought it was just going to be a cakewalk.
That leads to the next facet of my GUTMC: McCain can prattle on about his supposed experience and Obama’s supposed lack, but if we’re talking about the states of their campaigns, he has no more experience running for president than Obama does – much less in fact, if you count Obama’s tough primary fight. McCain is a long-term senator, but how many big-deal speeches has he ever given on national TV? Has he ever had reporters (some of them “unfriendly”) following him around for this long? He’s used to gearing up for an hour every other week or so on Meet the Press and maybe having a few “helpful” reporters around to write down “what he meant” rather than what he said, but he was not and is not prepared to have his exact words broadcast nationwide every day.
I would speculate that it’s a generational/technological thing, but that could be interpreted as a slap at McCain’s age, and that would make McCain and Bob Schieffer cry, so it’s on the list of things you can’t say about McCain. So I have absolutely no idea why it is.
State Department Official Downplays Iran’s Strategic Influence
On the same day Iran test-fired missiles in a show of force in the Persian Gulf, the Bush administration Wednesday sought to downplay the country’s power and influence.
“For its part, Tehran seems to relish heightening concerns by promoting the illusion that Iran is on the ascendance,” Undersecretary of State William Burns said in prepared testimony for the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “However, Iran is not 10 feet tall, nor is it even the dominant regional actor.
CNN:
Leading diplomat calls Iran a top concern for U.S.
Iran is as serious a problem as any the U.S. faces today, top State Department official William Burns said Wednesday, hours after the Islamic republic test-fired a long-range missile.
Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, made the comments testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
ABC: McCain setting the stage for comeback leading to triumphant presidential glory.
Has excessive media fluffing robbed John McCain of his hard edge?
A very interesting and perceptive analysis from TPM Reader DB …
My own attempt at a GUT of McCain’s general lousiness as a stump speaker–in which I attempt to unify the separate fields of flip-flopping, Social Security trashing, and casual jokes about bombing or otherwise killing foreigners–goes as follows: It’s the media’s fault.
Let me explain. As is obvious, the media has been giving McCain a free pass on everything. It always has. The reason is that the media likes McCain. Again, it always has. It likes his status as a former POW. It likes the fact that he provides reporters with unlimited access. It likes the fact that he has always been a very quotable maverick.
So the media has never held McCain accountable for what he says. Gaffes are overlooked, factual misstatements are glossed over, and inconsistencies are forgiven. This has always been true of the way the media has treated McCain.
But what has been the obvious consequence of this? It is simply that McCain has never had to learn the self-discipline that other successful politicians learn and deeply internalize very early in their careers. I know some successful politicians and have worked closely with one of them for many years. These individuals were able to progress in their careers precisely because the careful scrutiny given them by the media taught them never to speak before thinking, always to be right about their facts, and always to consider the long-term consequences of anything they might say in public.
Because the media treated him as an exception to its normal rules, McCain simply never developed these habits of careful thought, analysis, and speech. And now he is paying the price. With the current pervasiveness of video coverage of everything he says, he is blithely creating one Democratic attack ad after another against him. In these ads, he serves as both the director and the star. But behind the scenes there is always the producer. In this case, the producer is the media.
In these past few months, we Democrats have been gnashing our teeth over the things the media has let McCain get away with. As it happens, we Democrats have been torturing ourselves for no reason. For by the very act of constantly applying a double standard to try to help McCain, the media has damaged him beyond repair.
I am willing to bet that, having never had to learn these basic candidate skills, McCain will continue to damage himself in the coming months as he makes one after another self-destructive statement on the record. He will thereby do our work for us.
Perhaps the lesson is this: those whom the media gods wish to destroy, first they fail to hold accountable.
I’m very interested to see if anyone asks McCain about his statement that Social Security is an “absolute disgrace.” If you see him asked, let us know.
TPMtv now has its own blog, with all our video clips for the day, as well as the blog stylings of TPMtv producer/editor Ben Craw.
The final vote was a rout: 69-28.
No surprises here. Just the weight of disappointment.
Late Update: Worth noting that Hillary voted against the bill, while Obama –as we’ve noted here before — changed positions on telecom immunity and voted for the bill.